Strengthening Women's Confidence in Grievance Redressal Online

CSBC is evaluating the role of individual factors in consumer behaviour to ultimately test whether an intervention designed to strengthen women's locus of control, fatalism or self-efficacy could encourage them to take greater action when faced with a dispute over digital financial services.

Introduction

India's robust digital financial service (DFS) market has played a significant part in boosting financial inclusion, especially in rural parts of the country. However, consumers rarely attempt formal redress when they encounter challenges with online financial service providers. The incidence of women taking action is low, perhaps due to structural economic and social barriers that can limit their financial inclusion. Although India has made significant progress in closing the gender gap in account ownership, social attitudes towards women's financial agency limit the success of digital banking in generating more robust financial livelihoods for women.

While there is a body of evidence on the barriers women consumers face in banking, this study will be a crucial contributor to the analysis of the role of individual factors in governing behaviour around consumer redress. This focus lays the groundwork to untangle the complex web of structural, social, material, and individual barriers to consumer redress for women.

Description and methodology

In a pre-intervention exploratory phase, our main aim is to correlate three individual-specific psychological factors (locus of control, self-efficacy, and fatalism) with self-reported digital finance consumer redress knowledge, attitudes and behaviours. The end behaviours of interest are raising complaints through the DFS formal redressal mechanisms, seeking alternate complaint channels (bank, agent, family, friends), and inaction. We also explore additional factors explaining grievance redressal identified in the qualitative interview phase: hassle aversion, trust (in DFS and generalised), propensity to complain/complaint behaviour, and social norms around DFS usage.

Results and highlights

We interviewed 25 people and surveyed 230 women and 231 men in Bihar and UP in early 2022.

From the qualitative interviews, we learnt that

• Most women respondents were aware of the existence of customer service but only a few used them. The first point of contact for most was the bank. Usage of the help button/in-app redressal service depended on the education of the respondent and their spouse.
• Barriers for women respondents seeking redressal were fears in using DFS, lack of information, a fear of speaking to customer service executives, distrust in online systems and uncertainty about whether the money would come back, and fear of failing to complete the process on the call.
• Women respondents who were aware of the redressal process and had supportive male family members were able to manage the redressal process by themselves and found the customer service cooperative.
• Women respondents who expressed confidence in problem-solving in general (self-efficacy) and had positive prior experience in redressal seeking reported higher confidence in aiding other women in their community to seek DFS redressal.

These results will inform a subsequent phase - intervention design and testing - by confirming barriers and facilitators to accessing consumer redress that are specific to women or common to everyone.

Research funders and other information

This research is being conducted under the ambit of IPA's grant to CSBC for consumer protection research. In addition, Dvara Research has contributed to this project during the formulation of the qualitative and survey phases. The study has passed a research ethics review by Ashoka University's Institutional Review Board. The trial registry link can be found here .